Practicing good nutrition is challenging. Even with an understanding of the current nutritional science, it can be difficult to follow a well-designed diet regularly. In addition to lapses in discipline, specific foods or foods which are good sources of a particular nutrient may be unavailable or inconvenient when needed. These challenges are compounded when attempting to obtain the benefit of helpful interactions between different foods or different nutrients.
Nutritional supplements have evolved, first from general vitamin and mineral supplements based on Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA) generally determined by studying different nutrients in isolation, to more sophisticated general vitamin and mineral supplements, to “supplemental foods” or “food supplements”. Whole-food supplementation seeks to provide the nutritional benefits of a food (as opposed to an isolated nutrient, which might be derived from a food, or synthesized or isolated from a non-food product) without the volumetric or caloric intake of consuming the food itself. This approach permits convenient, concentrated nutrient uptake in a form that mimics the mixture of nutrients found in a whole food, and, therefore, the helpful interactions between different nutrients that naturally occur in a particular food.
Nutrient interactions have been the subject of extensive study over the last 25 years, but are still a highly unpredictable field. Extrapolations from interactions between individual nutrients to classes of nutrients often fail, sometimes with no synergy observed for closely related class members, and sometimes with deleterious effects when substituting one nutrient for another class member. A supplemental food approach may help reduce variability in response by preserving naturally occurring interactions. Of course, even with a supplemental food approach, removing bulk and calories from a food necessarily involves decisions about extraction and processing that can unintentionally change the types and relative amounts of nutrients in a supplement, which can, in turn, unintentionally change the presence or degree of the nutritional benefit of the supplement. These challenges, too, are exacerbated when a supplement aims to provide the benefit of multiple food components, e.g., to mimic benefits from consuming several types of foods together. Ayurvedic medicine, for example, addresses hundreds of herbs which may be helpful for maintaining or restoring health, often used in combinations of 3 or more herbs.
There remains a need for dietary supplements which provide specific combinations of nutrients in desirable ratios. There remains a need for dietary supplements which support specific aspects of health and well-being.